Project
Fermented Feed Optimized (FEFO)
The feed industry relies on a wide range of plant-based products as feed ingredients for swine and poultry. For sustainability and circularity reasons, the interest in alternative protein sources to soybean meal has increased over the years. In addition, partially driven by sustainability ambitions and to avoid the competition between food and feed, more low-value by-products produced in the E.U. will become available for utilization in animal feed. However, low-value by-products are often accompanied by low nutritional value and are poorly digested. Therefore, these are still under-utilized despite the potential for use these side-streams as a low cost feed.
The aim of this project is to upcycle these recalcitrant/low-value/low-nutritional side streams into highly digestible ingredients with added functionality in terms of health benefits (e.g., improved gut health, immunomodulatory, and anti-microbial) for pig and broiler diet formulations using a low cost and mild process to allow implementation of the technology on a broad scale.
Fermentation is already employed for decades as a key technology to stabilize feed and reduce anti-nutritional factors and is implemented on an industrial scale, whilst retaining the option of localized implementation due to the option of low-cost systems. At present, limited information is available regarding the use of fermentation technology to specifically increase the nutritional value of low-value by-products for monogastric animals such as swine and poultry especially with respect to high lignin containing substrates. Here we will attempt to address this knowledge gap to facilitate and accelerate the implementation.
The approach here will be to use fully standardized high-throughput screening of solid-state type fermentations and selection of high potential processes. This will be followed by upscaling of promising substrate:micro-organism combinations assessment of these fermented feeds in in-vitro and in-vivo trials. This all will be accompanied by nutritional, safety and techno-economical evaluations. This project aims to maximize the use of a low-cost and robust technologies to enable the increase in nutritional value of by-products (and thus value) and is anticipated to be well scalable. This will result in better use and valorisation of side-streams into the feed outlet, while animal growth efficiency is maintained due to the increased nutritional value of fermented products and animal health might be improved concurrently. Thus, the concept envisaged aims to positively impact both the environment and the economics of feed and animal production as a result of the reduced land use, carbon footprint, and import costs.
The consortium is specifically setup to provide both theoretical and practical expertise on the screening approach (Wageningen Food & Biobased Research and Wageningen Plan Research), the in vitro and in vivo trials (Schothorst Feed Research and Wageningen Animal Nutrition) and techno-economic analysis of selected processed (Schothorst Feed Research). This ensures that all aspects of selection of optimal processes can be conducted in this project.